This invention relates to the fields of communications and computer systems. More particularly, a scaleable communications management network architecture is provided for managing subscriber communication sessions.
As mobile communications become more widely accepted, providers are offering an ever-increasing variety of services, including prepaid services. With prepaid services, a customer purchases a predetermined number of wireless communication credits or minutes. Because the customer has prepaid for the services, he or she does not need to enter into a credit agreement with the service provider or demonstrate an acceptable credit history. Prepaid wireless communication services are especially attractive to young adults who are unable or unwilling to enter into long-term credit commitments of the kind required for traditional mobile communication service arrangements.
Providers of prepaid communication services naturally wish to ensure that their customers' service usage does not exceed their prepaid credits. Therefore, providers generally automate the process of tracking their customers' service usage, maintaining their credit balances and managing their communication sessions. As more and more subscribers join a provider, the burden placed on the provider's management network or system increases commensurately. In addition to the tasks associated with enabling and controlling individual communication sessions, the provider's management network may also be responsible for tasks such as provisioning new customers' accounts, routing SMS (Short Message Service) messages, monitoring network statuses, etc.
However, computer systems employed by the provider to manage customer accounts and credit balances have finite processing limits. Traditionally, when such a processing limit was approached, the provider would replace or reconfigure the computer system. This could entail significant expense and labor costs, in addition to a possible loss of service availability for some period of time.
Therefore, there is a need for a communications management network architecture that is easily scaleable to support increasing numbers of customers, without the costs and risk of service outage inherent in traditional architectures.
In addition, with prepaid communication services a customer must replenish his or her account in a timely manner in order to avoid service termination. However, it is very easy for a customer to forget to perform such replenishment. And, if the customer is very active, he or she may have to replenish frequently, especially if replenishing with small sums. Depending on how often the customer must replenish, the complexity of replenishment and any fees that may assessed the customer, repeated replenishment may become onerous.
Thus, there is also a need for a method of automatically replenishing a customer's prepaid communication services balance.